I Realised I Had Been Living for the Approval of Someone Who Was Already Gone
Somewhere in my late twenties i started tracing certain choices back and noticing where they actually originated. Why i had pursued certain things and avoided others. What standard i had been measuring myself against without fully naming it.
A significant number of those threads led back to one person. Someone who was no longer in my life. A relationship that had ended years before that i had not thought about consciously very much. But whose voice, or my internal version of it, was apparently still operational in the background of how i made decisions about myself.
The internal audience does not automatically update when the external relationship ends. The voice that had once belonged to a real person asking whether this was good enough, whether this measured up, whether this was the kind of thing that would have gotten their approval, that voice had stayed. Had become part of the furniture of my inner life without me deciding to keep it.
I was still performing for someone who had left the room years ago.
When i examined specific choices with that clarity, the absurdity of it was clear enough to produce some genuine grief as well as relief. The grief for the years of performing for an audience that was not even watching. The relief of seeing it clearly enough to finally address it.
The work of replacing someone else’s inherited standard with your own actual one is not instant. But it starts with the noticing. With being honest enough to admit that the voice currently running the approval check is not yours.
Whose standard are you actually living under right now. Check honestly. Then decide if that person still deserves the authority you have been giving them.
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